


today's a new one

by blamethenargless



Category: Runaways (TV 2017)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, But that's not really relevant to the story, Character Study, Family Dynamics, Gen, Growing Up, Hero Complex, In a sense, Post-Canon, alex wilder is the last alien host, forced to grow up, molly hernandez is a good sister, molly is still a kid dammit, molly the martyr bless her heart
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-04-15
Packaged: 2020-01-14 12:44:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18476506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blamethenargless/pseuds/blamethenargless
Summary: For now, though, all she has is a crumpled receipt and a smudgy list and a hole in her chest the size of her sister. And she’s cursed with too-wide eyes and a heart even larger, so she makes up her mind to go on a quest. Maybe she thinks it’s romantic, in the high-fantasy sort of way; maybe she’s just blind to the impossibility of safe return and all parties accounted for.Maybe she’s decided to become a leader. Someone has to take the reins.orMolly knows the rest of the Runaways are out there. And she knows she's the only one willing to find them.





	today's a new one

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! This is my first foray into Molly's mind, so please bear with me. 
> 
> As always, everything belongs to the creators. 
> 
> Enjoy!

There’s three people left.

Three of them in a house (Hostel?) far too large—in a house that was already too large for six runaway kids with dirt on their face and dogs at their heels.

Well, technically, there’s four or five (or six, if you’re counting Leslie’s baby, which Molly does) in the house, but… it’s terse. It’s difficult. It’s easier to pretend there’s only three.

(Entirely unfair, Molly thinks, but easier.)

They’ll take it day by day. That’s what Molly says at noontime breakfast: “Day by day. Today’s a new one.” It’s what Gert told her when Molly crawled into her bed in the early hours of morning, hands trembling, whispering words of insecurity and fear and a whole lot of unsteady. It’s what Stacey kissed onto her temple when she came home, exhausted, from a too-long day of school. It’s what Dale pressed into his hug when she fretted about a geometry test.

It seems so trivial now, that geometry test.

She repeats it like a mantra and hopes that it’ll just wake someone up. _Today’s a new one_ . _Today’s a new one. Today’s a new one._

“Would you please just shut up,” Nico says, her first words in twelve hours. Since Karolina didn’t return. “Please.” Her voice is quiet, cracked at the edges. It slips into Molly’s ears like a ghost.

“I just—”

“It’s not even a new day,” Alex cuts in. “We made the call that they weren’t coming back early this morning. So it’s actually _not_ a new one.”

That silences Molly well enough. She stares at the doorway to the kitchen where Xavin frets.

A few hours ago, Xavin implored the rest of the group to go back out, find their “betrothed”. One silencing spell and two ostracizing glares later, and the topic was dropped.

Now, Xavin hovers by the doorway, but does not come into the dining room. No one offers them a seat. A fork dangles sadly from their fingertips, one small grape impaled on the end. Given any other circumstance, Molly would laugh.

She eats the rest of her breakfast of bagels and strawberries in relative silence, taking small bites. There’s a near-silent blanket covering the Hostel, with almost no conversation and just a touch of ambient noise—Alex’s murmurs as he taps on his phone screen, Xavin’s footfalls in the kitchen, the creaking of Leslie’s bed as she tries to sleep in past noon.

Nico’s eyes are rimmed in purple-black, and Molly worries she’s suffering brain trauma. That’s what Gert told her—raccoon eyes ( _yes, Molls, that’s the medical term_ ) are usually indicative of some deeper brain trauma.

But if she were to ask, Molly knows Nico wouldn’t answer, and Alex would bitch, and it would just make everything in the too-big Hostel more painful. So instead, she settles for watching Nico closely as she picks at her food. She doesn’t eat it. Just picks it slowly apart, pulling the inside of the bagel out, ripping it into the smallest crumbs she can make. Her plate looks like it’s dusted in snowflakes make of carbohydrates.

Molly doesn’t know what to do. She’s not a leader. Nico is, but she’s practically catatonic, and Alex is, but he’s biting and cruel and something vicious is twisting inside his chest, something whose gaze stays a little too long on Leslie and her stomach and who gets a little too much joy out of his first-person shooters and who isn’t talking about what happened with his parents. Not a word. So it starts to feel like the Hostel made for more-than-six (or seven or eight at times) is a prison for just one.

The rest of the day passes the same, stretching out furiously like the world’s most vendetta-filled molasses. Silence and tense shoulders and Xavin’s sad, longing glances. Nico not moving, not eating. Alex pacing furiously. Leslie raiding the cabinets for pickles and refusing to look anyone in the eye. And all the while, Molly’s head is spinning and her gears are turning.

She isn’t a leader, but she’s a quick learner, so she itemizes all that she’s learned. (She was impulsive yesterday, but it’s day by day and today’s a new one.)

Fact: Gert is missing, and Old Lace with her. So is Karolina.

Fact: Chase hasn’t returned to the side of good, and Leslie is a pretty crap supplement thus far.

Fact: Stacey was acting strangely in the mall, and Gert mentioned Tina was, too, when they were trapped together. Something must have changed with Victor, or with Janet, for Chase to have returned to his parents.

Fact: The Wilders are, to quote Alex, “not a problem anymore.”

Molly really doesn’t want to think about the implications of that. Or that he keeps refreshing the news app on his phone.

Fact: She really doesn’t know what all these facts add up to, and she’s starting to get a little discouraged, and she sort of gets why Nico’s so damn unresponsive right now.

She stares blankly at the list she’s scrawled onto the back of a receipt. It feels pointless. It feels pointless, but that’s how everyone else feels, and Molly is the strongest one of the group, she knows that, and she has to be the strongest now, too. She has to fight for her friends. Hell, if she could, she’d raze Los Angeles, fists blazing a path through anything that got in her way.

For now, though, all she has is a crumpled receipt and a smudgy list and a hole in her chest the size of her sister. And she’s cursed with too-wide eyes and a heart even larger, so she makes up her mind to go on a quest. Maybe she thinks it’s romantic, in the high-fantasy sort of way; maybe she’s just blind to the impossibility of safe return and all parties accounted for.

Maybe she’s decided to become a leader. Someone has to take the reins.

She packs up quickly and in silence. Granola bars, a canteen of water, a spare pair of clothes, her phone charger, a box of bandaids. She stuffs everything into a small backpack and heads towards the front door.

There’s no one waiting to stop her. She didn’t think there would be. Xavin avoids any place that might have foot traffic, Leslie’s been sleeping or eating, Alex is immersed in whatever’s on his phone and seems to be taking the _let’s plan it out_ approach (which, Molly worries, could mean too little too late friends gone sister dead and she _doesn’t_ want to think about it anymore), and Nico just doesn’t have the energy for it. Nico has lost too much too quick too often, and she just doesn’t have the energy for it.

Molly gets that. Molly _was_ that, but not exactly—she burnt in the other way, hard and fast and furious. She still feels her fuse turning to ash every now and then, but she’s managed, at least for today, to contain the fire in her heart and the bruises on her split knuckles. So when she leaves, she leaves softly. Today’s a new one. Her exit’s a quick slip out the front door, a note left on the kitchen table.

 _Out to find them,_ she writes. _Be back soon xox._

She hopes that’s true.

Outside, the afternoon sun beats down brutally. She’s thankful for the bandana that keeps her hair out of her face, and curses herself for forgetting sunscreen. Still—she’s made a commitment now, and she thinks that if she turns around, she’ll lose the nerves she’s managed to steady and fall back into old Molly. Before-her-sister-was-taken Molly. Before-her-friend-betrayed-her Molly. Before her world was struck in the chin harder than any blow she herself could give and sent her reeling, blind and backward.

She’s got an iron spine and fire-filled eyes and a body that knows how to put one foot in front of the other, so she takes a step forward.

And then another. And then another. She doesn’t know where she’s going; she only knows she has to go _somewhere_ . Her feet lead her across the parched California land, earth cracking with each pace, shoulders back and chin high. She’d set herself a soundtrack—after all, this _is_ her romance-in-the-archaic-sense-of-the-word-high-fantasy-rescue-hero-mission—but she doesn’t want to waste phone battery, so she’s consigned to journey in silence.

Silence—there’s a lot of that now, after weeks of noise and chaos that she used to pray would subside. She wishes it was back to tripping over Old Lace’s tail as she rushed down the hall. She wishes it was back to walking in on her sister making out with Chase and retching at the sight. She wishes it was back to Karolina cooking them vegan pancakes and Nico lovingly finishing her serving, the pain in her eyes at how _terrible_ of a cook Karolina is just barely hidden. She wishes it was back to late-night vigilante justice and the punishment that came with sneaking out, with scathing reprimands and friends who truly did just have her safety and best interests at heart. She wishes it was back to failing miserably at video games with Alex, back to accidentally crushing a controller in her fingers after placing last in Mario Kart. His laugh, she remembers, rang bright and clear.

She wonders when the phone in her back pocket will buzz with a text or a call—or if it’ll buzz at all. Then she wonders who it’ll be from.

She realizes about an hour in that she’s properly and completely screwed. “Shit,” she whispers through cracked lips, because she _can_ say ‘shit’, because Gert isn’t there, and neither is the rest of her family. She has no idea where she is, or where she’s been, or where she’s going. She has no idea how to get back to the Hostel, and no guarantee Alex would return her text before some hungry desert lion got to her. No guarantee, even, that her phone won’t die or her service won’t be shot.

But she’s taking it day by day, right? And today’s a new one. “Today’s a new one,” she says to herself, and her voice is drenched in resignation. “You got this, Molly.”

At some point, she has to stop and rest. Even the strongest of girls has her breaking point—she’s seen Nico, she knows that. Molly’s feet are aching; her shoulders, too. She swings her back off her back and hungrily devours two granola bars, swigs generously from the canteen. For a moment, for a wild moment, she lets herself think _I could just run away. Again and again and again until I reach a place where no one knows my name. Where I could just be fifteen._

But she picks herself up again. Because Gert is out there, somewhere. Because she needs to find her sister. Because she needs to find her friends, her family. Because that’s what’s right. She does what’s right. 

She suddenly remembers— _oh, I’m not just a kid. I’m a superhero_. She’s saving people. She’s saved people. She’s doing what all the greats do. It strikes a song into her heart and pumps blood faster through her veins. Each step after that is supercharged, each step after that sends her bounding across a barren plain until she thinks she could almost be flying for how far and fast she leaps.

For the first time in too long for an optimistic teenage girl, she smiles.

The wind sweeps through her hair and whispers as she flies by. Her ears ring with _go, go, go_ , and she does. She runs as fast as she can, arms pumping, grin unrestrained. She has… she has purpose, now. She _knows_ what she’s doing and she knows why. She feels like she’s back in blackened allyways, fists swinging, blood trickling down her split lip, saving people who can’t save themselves. She actually feels like a hero.

Of course, she’s limited and untrained, and optimism can’t carry a heavy backpack, so she tires out. By then, the sun’s much lower in the sky, and the whole world seems to shimmer with a dusky red glow. By then, she can make out houses in the near distance, and she prays to whatever power there might be that it’s not some sort of mirage.

Her footfalls slow. Her legs feel like lead. Her head is pounding. Her throat is raw and her eyes are tearing up and her feet ache something vicious.

_Day by day today’s a new one carry on Molly keep going just one more step—_

Before she can make it to the nearest house, she sinks to the ground, exhausted. She tries to push herself to standing, but doesn’t make it to her hands and knees before she blacks out, falling like a ragdoll out across the dirt. The last thing she thinks before her eyes flutter shut is: _I hope that_ I’m _not the one they waste a tracking spell on._

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Kudos/Comments always appreciated :)


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